Finally, at 2:12 p.m. — 9:12 a.m. in Washington — a new page appeared. There, staring back at me, were two mug shots, one of Kuznetsov and one of Karpov, along with Senator Cardin’s letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Attached to the letter was the list of the sixty officials involved in Sergei’s death and the tax fraud, and next to each name was his or her department affiliation, rank, date of birth, and role in the Magnitsky case. Cardin was requesting that all sixty have their US travel privileges permanently revoked.
I fell back into my chair.
It was real. It was here, right in front of the world’s eyes. Something had finally been done to hold the people who’d killed Sergei to account. As I stared at the screen, a lump formed in my throat. If Sergei was looking down on us, he would see that his heartbreaking prison letters, in which he’d pleaded for help, were finally being heard.
Within ten minutes, the Russian newswires started reporting the story. Within thirty minutes, the Western press picked it up. By the end of the day a new term had been created and repeated over and over: the Cardin List.
Nobody in Russia had heard of Ben Cardin before, but after April 26, 2010, the conventional wisdom in Russia was that this senator from Maryland was the most important politician in America. Russian human rights activists and opposition politicians jumped onto the bandwagon, writing letters to President Obama and the head of the EU supporting the Cardin List. Not since Ronald Reagan had Russians witnessed a foreign politician act so decisively on a Russian human rights issue. The sad fact was that most Russian atrocities were never noticed by the outside world, and in the rare instances that they were, foreign governments almost never reacted to them. But now, all of a sudden, a US senator was calling for sixty named Russian officials to have their US visas revoked for their involvement in a human rights atrocity. It was totally unprecedented.
While average Russians were celebrating, Putin’s top officials were apoplectic. All of his key lieutenants had used their jobs to become enormously wealthy, and many had done some very nasty things to get rich. In theory, the Cardin List opened the door so that these people could be sanctioned in the future. As far as they were concerned, the list changed everything for them.
But, at least initially, they needn’t have worried. Back in Washington, the State Department wanted to do nothing in response to the Cardin letter and hoped that by just sitting on the letter and ignoring Cardin, the problem would go away.
But it didn’t. If the State Department was going to ignore Senator Cardin, then Kyle was going to up the ante. He arranged for me to testify about the Magnitsky case in front of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives in early May.
The hearing was scheduled for May 6 at the Rayburn House Office Building, which sits just to the southwest of the Capitol. Completed in 1965, the building is in the stripped-down style of the neoclassical architecture you see all over Washington, although the inside is not like other congressional buildings. It has no soaring marble columns or domes or cherrywood panels on the walls. Instead, there are linoleum floors, low ceilings, and chrome details on the clocks and in the elevators.
I’d never been there before, so I arrived well before the 10:00 a.m. start time in order to get a feel for the place. I entered from Independence Avenue, going through the small security checkpoint manned by a pair of Capitol police. I found my way to room 2255 and had a quick look inside. The large hearing room had a horseshoe dais for the commission members, two long tables for the guest speakers, and an audience gallery behind the speakers with seats for about seventy-five people. The chairman — a Massachusetts congressman named Jim McGovern — hadn’t arrived yet, but aides, staffers, and various others milled around making small talk. I retreated to the hall and went over Sergei’s story in my head.
When I reentered the room, little papers folded into upside-down Vs had been placed on the speakers’ tables. There were representatives from prestigious human rights organizations — the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, and the International Protection Centre — and I felt a bit out of place as a businessman amid all of these professional human rights activists.
I spotted Kyle Parker, who sat off to one side of the gallery, just as Congressman McGovern entered. McGovern was a congenial man with a prominent bald spot and a pleasant, boyish face. He greeted all the witnesses with a firm handshake and spoke with a Boston accent. I was drawn to him immediately. He asked us to sit, and the hearing commenced promptly.
The first speaker was an advocate for persecuted journalists in Russia. She read from a statement and was knowledgeable, citing numerous facts and figures about killings and abductions of journalists who’d exposed the crimes of the Russian regime. I was intimidated by both the enormity of her testimony and her grasp of policy issues. I was just speaking about one case, one man, and didn’t even have a prepared statement to read from.
The next speaker was from Human Rights Watch, and she repeated many of the same points in the litany of Russian rights abuses that her organization had documented. She also referred to a number of notorious cases, including the murders of Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova. I remembered both stories well, and I was impressed by this speaker. When she was finished I felt even more inadequate.
The preppy staffers scattered around the room were less moved. They’d sat through many such hearings and had heard it all before. Their noses were turned downward to tiny screens cupped in their hands, thumbs dancing over BlackBerry keypads, and they’d barely noticed as the first presenter wrapped up and the next one took the stage.
At last it was my turn. I didn’t have any statistics or spreadsheets or policy recommendations. I just stood uncomfortably, pulling at the cuffs of my jacket, and started talking. I gave a little background on myself and then told the committee Sergei Magnitsky’s deep, dark story. I looked Congressman McGovern straight in the eye, and he returned my gaze. Step-by-step, I told him and the others how Sergei had uncovered the crime, how he was arrested after testifying, how he had been sadistically tortured in prison, and how, finally, he had been killed.
As I spoke, I noticed that the fresh-faced staffers had stopped tapping away at their BlackBerrys. I concluded my speech by asking the commission to support Senator Cardin in his call to the State Department to impose visa sanctions on Sergei’s killers. In closing, I said, «Sergei Magnitsky is one individual case, but there are thousands upon thousands of other cases just like his. And the people who do these things will continue doing them unless there is some way of challenging them and showing them there is no impunity».
I sat and glanced at my watch. My speech had taken eight minutes. I smoothed my hands over the table and looked around. Several people in the room had tears in their eyes, including some of the human rights activists. I waited for someone to speak, but the room remained still.
Finally, after about twenty seconds, McGovern laced his fingers together and leaned forward. «I have had the privilege of being the cochair of this commission for almost two years, and I have learned an awful lot. We have been inundated with so many statistics and facts that sometimes we lose the human ability to actually feel them, Mr. Browder. That is why I am grateful you were here to talk about the case of Mr. Magnitsky. That is a really tragic story. I think people who commit murder should not have the right to travel here and invest in businesses here. There should be a consequence. So one of the things I would like to do, we will not only send a letter to Hillary Clinton, but I think we should introduce legislation and put those sixty people’s names down there and move it to the committee and make a formal recommendation from Congress, pass it on the floor, saying to the administration, This is a consequence. You have got to do this, because if you don’t, nothing is going to happen. You have my pledge that we will do that».